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Tip of the day: If you need to get someplace in a hurry, absolutely do not drive behind any of the following people:
Taxi Drivers in and around Washington, DC
Any man wearing a hat (baseball caps excluded)
Anyone with a bumper sticker indicating that they are a veteran of any branch of the armed services
Anyone with an American flag affixed to their car (Regrettably, this includes beloved Mother Rubble)
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While stuck behind slow drivers this morning, I happened to think of our friend Miss J, who is, I am convinced, Bette Midler's given-up-for-adoption daughter. (Before you ask, there is plenty of evidence to support this, and yes, Bette Midler really did give up a daughter for adoption). Anyway, she appears in an Altoids print ad (Miss J, not Bette Midler) and here it is.
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Jet and I are gearing up for an intensive evening of laying under the covers reading comic books, which we’ll do after attending Floozy Flingland’s recital (at 8pm in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the University of Maryland, if you’re free). After that, we will go home to Dino and act like fat pimply-faced losers who live in their parents’ basements for twenty minutes. (Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to cast aspersions, as I am fat, was once pimply-faced, and lived in my grandmother’s basement for awhile…but I’ve just updated my C.V. this morning and am feeling really full of myself).
It is rare that Jet will get more excited than me about a comic book, but today might be it. It’s the return, you see, of Hal Jordan, the greatest Green Lantern, ever (not that I necessarily think so, I’m just reporting what others have said).
‘Bout ten years ago, ol’ Hal went a little crazy, after an intergalactic terrorist blew up his hometown, and as many crazy people do, he went mad with power, murdered the person who taught him everything he knew, absorbed the Central Power Battery on the planet Oa, and became a bad guy. He was replaced as Green Lantern by the young, hip, cute, and recently revealed as half-Hispanic Kyle Rayner (below).
Then he tried to go back to the Big Bang and re-start the Universe.
Then this giant space creature that looked like fake vomit snuffed out the sun, and the Earth had just about had it, until Hal re-ignited the sun in a final act of selflessness, which seemingly did him in.
Except then he came back as a re-animated corpse which housed the supernatural Spirit of Redemption.
Still with me?
Meanwhile, Kyle Rayner started being written by Judd Winick, whom you may remember as a cast member on Real World: San Francisco. As every story Judd writes has to revolve around someone being gay-bashed or having AIDS, and Kyle was neither gay nor had AIDS, he was pretty much made irrelevant in his own comic book.
Also meanwhile, the Cartoon Network started up a Justice League cartoon, and in the interest of political correctness shoehorned in an African-American Green Lantern, which meant that the comics had to shoehorn him into the comics, further simarginalizing poor Kyle.
All this while, fat pimply-faced losers have been generating petitions in their parents’ basements demanding the return of Hal Jordan, The One, True, Green Lantern. I won't bother to point out that Hal Jordan himself is actually a revised version of the Golden-Age Green Lantern, and the reason that there are so many different Lanterns - see picture, below - is that he's always been a boring character and hasn't been able to sell a series on his own in a good thirty years. I'm just sayin'.
So, in six issues, we are promised that all these loose ends will be tied up, Hal will somehow justify murdering his friend or turn out to not be a murderer at all, and somehow stop hosting the Spirit of Redemption, and be alive, and not evil, and be accepted by the hero community as a good guy again, and leave room for the black guy who is still on the cartoon show.
Yea, comics!
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